A rare set of Old Master Drawings is set to go on view at London’s National Portrait Gallery, including sketches and pieces by Leonardo da Vinci, Dürer, Rubens and Rembrandt.  “Some of the drawings were perhaps never intended to leave the artists’ studios, but are arguably among the most engaging and powerful impressions of personal likeness in the history of art,” says Director Nicholas Cullinan.  (more…)

The Guardian has a piece this week on Claude Monet’s fascination with the foggy landscapes of London, and the city’s enduring influence on his work.  “Without fog London would not be beautiful,” he once claimed. (more…)

Nathalie de Gunzburg, chairwoman of the Dia Art Foundation’s board in Manhattan, is featured in this week’s edition of NYT’s new ‘Show Us Your Wall’ series, touring the paper through her collection of classic minimalist works, and reflecting on the era’s initial impact on her.  “I always thought that it looked like New York — rigid, sometimes imposing, very muscular. But I have to say that living with it in a place like this city actually calms me,” she says. (more…)

France’s culture ministry has launched a new prize dedicated to female contemporary artists, the AWARE awards.  “Invisible for too long, put in the background, ignored, women artists must find in the 21st-century their place in all the artistic disciplines,” French culture minister Audrey Azoulay said in a statement.  The first winners of the award are Laetitia Badaut Haussmann and Judit Reigl. (more…)

A 100% cut to the arts budget in the city of Bath has led to calls for intervention by the UK Culture Secretary.  “The council has committed an act of cultural vandalism in Bath that will result in a new dark age for arts and culture in the region,” says Equity deputy general secretary Stephen Spence. (more…)

The failure to purchase a £30 million painting for the National Gallery and prevent it from leaving the UK has resulted in calls to reform the country’s art export rules, the Guardian reports.  “Today’s news that Tom Hill, the American buyer of Pontormo’s Portrait of a Young Man in a Red Cap, has refused the National Gallery’s matching offer of over £30m marks a great cultural loss to the nation,” says the Art Fund’s Stephen Deuchar.  “We believe the UK’s art export control system should serve our public collections more effectively than at present.” (more…)

The Guardian reports on the current state of public art in the UK, often supported by private estates and new building projects rather than the public organizations of previous eras, and looks at recent efforts by artists to use public art to engage these problems.  “We questioned the capitalist logic of the proposed development,” says artist Jessie Brennan of a recent work on public land in Peterborough, “and offered alternative evidence for the current social use and value of the land.” (more…)

Jean-Luc Moulène (Installation View), via Art Observed

To walk through Jean-Luc Moulène’s retrospective at The Centre Pompidou is to traverse through a wasteland of fossils and discarded matter, a history of repurposed and spliced objects placed into an ever-evolving series of dialogues and interactions.  Giving off subtle senses of a dystopian, simulated future, the artist’s sculptures play on a suspended sense of reality, often challenging its role as constructed object or sourced material that plays on a rupture between past, present and future, disrupting easy legibility while staging a site where these divergent sensations are allowed to co-exist. (more…)

Anish Kapoor’s swirling, watery void Descension is set to go on view at Brooklyn Bridge this summer, courtesy the Public Art Fund.  “Anish Kapoor reminds us of the contingency of appearances: our senses inevitably deceive us,” says Public Art Fund Director and Chief Curator Nicholas Baume says.  “With Descension, he creates an active object that resonates with changes in our understanding and experience of the world.” (more…)

Aline Kominsky-Crumb and R. Crumb, Drawn Together (Installation View)

Drawn Together, a decade-spanning look at the collaborative work of the cartoonist husband and wife Aline Kominsky-Crumb and R. Crumb, offers a well-timed opportunity for lovers of the graphic arts at David Zwirner, coinciding with the opening of the New Museum’s Raymond Petitibon retrospective A Pen of All Work.  Although they were individually prominent artists in the graphic arts scene during the course of their careers, Aline and Robert delivered a unique visual and intellectual body of work that both drew on their marriage in the early ‘70s. Later gathered in a series titled Aline and Bob’s Dirty Laundry Comics, which debuted in 1974, the couple’s ongoing collaboration is a statement on marriage, partnership, and dependency, as well as on sexuality and gender roles of the society they lived and worked within. (more…)

Jannis Kounellis, via Art Newspaper

Greek-Italian Arte Povera pioneer Jannis Kounellis has passed away in Rome at the age of 80, according to the Italian Minister of Culture.  “It is a sad day, Kounellis has left us. A master, Italian by adoption, who left a mark on contemporary art,” Minister Dario Franceschini tweeted today. (more…)

After only nine months at the Brooklyn Museum, Nancy Spector is returning to the Guggenheim as both chief curator and artistic director, the New York Times reports, a role that will see her expand on the museum’s projects globally.  “Because we’re multi-sited and that’s growing, it seemed to me like the institution really needed a discriminating synthesizer, and Nancy was interested in that and I think really the best person for it,” director Richard Armstrong says. (more…)

Yayoi Kusama is the subject of a profile in the Washington Post this week, as the artist continues to paint and design new pieces.  “I’m old now, but I am still going to create more work and better work. More than I have in the past,” she says. “My mind is full of paintings.” (more…)

Adrian Ghenie, Rest During the Flight into Egypt (2016), via Art Observed

Drawing on a wide range of works from the artist’s recent practice, Pace Gallery is presenting a series of new paintings by Adrian Ghenie, drawing on the artist’s unique approach to both the construction of his canvases, and the position his work takes in its relation to broader timeline of European painting and political history.

Adrian Ghenie, Degenerate Art (2016), via Art Observed

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David Hockney’s early lithograph Fish and Chips Shop, which hung for years over the fryers at Sea Catch fish and chip shop in Eccleshill, West Yorkshire, will sell at Christie’s in London next month, expected to bring £6,000 to £8,000.  “There is something wonderful about a local chippy with a rare Hockney hanging above the fryer,” says Murray Macaulay, the auction house’s head of prints.  (more…)

The Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum in Braunschweig, Germany, has announced the discovery of a rare drawing by Rembrandt, which had sat in its collection unnoticed for almost 250 years.  The drawing of a dog is one of only a few known works by the artist depicting animals in that medium.   (more…)

Widespread lay-offs at auction startup Paddle8 have left the company “gutted” by some reports, as many departments are now run by a single staffer.  The news comes after the company’s split with Auctionata, with little information provided about either company’s next steps. (more…)

Anicka Yi is profiled in the New York Times this week, as she prepares to open her Hugo Boss Prize exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, and elaborates on the relationship of smell to both her work and personal history.  “Smell is the sense that’s most closely associated with women, and I think it’s a mistake to relegate it that way,” she says. “That gendering reflects a long history of misogynist understanding about the mind and the body.” (more…)

Jake and Dinos Chapman have left London’s White Cube gallery after nearly 20 years to join Blain|Southern.  “We are both proud of the work we have done collectively and wish each other the best for the future,” a spokesperson for White Cube said. (more…)

Art Basel has announced the exhibitor list for the 2017 edition of its flagship fair in Basel, Switzerland, including 17 new galleries, and a group of new galleries moving into the premiere section of the fair, including Campoli Presti and Luxembourg & Dayan.   (more…)

The New York Times looks at an exhibition currently on view at the Denver Museum of Art, exploring the personal life and practice of Jean-Michel Basquiat, centered around the photographs of his former girlfriend, Alexis Adler.  “Basquiat’s time with Alexis was an important transitional moment because he was still exploring many creative outlets with equal passion, including playing music, performance, drawing and writing,” says Nora Abrams, the show’s curator. (more…)

Controversy over the allegedly unauthorized Anselm Kiefer exhibition at the Central Academy of Fine Arts Museum (CAFAM) in Beijing has escalated this week, after curators blasted the artist’s dealers for limiting curatorial freedom.  “Curators must respect the artist but also be able to work for the wider public’s benefit,” says Beate Reifenscheid, the show’s chief curator and president of the German national committee of Icom (International Council of Museums).  “If all artists and their art dealers could control when, where and why their art is displayed in museums after it’s sold, the public interest would not be fully served.” (more…)

Several Boston students aided in the arrest of a man attempting to steal five paintings from an area gallery this past month, NBC News reports, including a series of etchings by Rembrandt and Picasso, and worth a total of $50,000.  “There was a brick through the front door that was completely shattered, then there was a pane of glass shattered in the door itself, and that is how he was able to access – he put his arm through the broken glass to open the door,” Camille Super, a gallery consultant, says. (more…)

The UK is reviewing plans to turn the Thames Estuary into a massive arts hub, with studios, foundries and other institutional resources for artists.  “London leads the way across the creative economy — from fashion to film, design to gaming, performing arts to the visual arts. It’s only right that we build on this success and transform the Thames Estuary into a world-class centre for creative production — leading global innovation, developing the talent of the future and cultivating world-changing ideas,” London mayor Sadiq Khan states. (more…)